Dr. Rittenburg does a lot of the same things over and over. She drinks coffee from the same Mickey Mouse mug every day. She writes notes down on paper with a fuzzy pink pen every day. And every day, after they are done talking, she pats Peter on the back and tells him, "Bye, Pete."
Peter likes talking to Dr. Rittenburg because it's always a secret. Whatever he says, it doesn't leave the room. He thinks maybe Dr. Rittenburg talks to Dad and Aunt May and Uncle Ben, but it's stuff like is Peter okay and not what did Peter tell you? Dr. Rittenburg promises him every single day, like he'll forget, that everything between them is confidential. Peter likes that word. Serious and all-business.
The only thing he doesn't like about going to Dr. Rittenburg's office is how long it takes to get there and come back. It changes a lot. Sometimes they have to swap cars in parking lots, sometimes they have to sit on benches or inside restaurants for a long time until a car comes for them. Peter doesn't think Dr. Rittenburg is a spy, but he does think that she works for spies—the ones that were there when Stane attacked him at Stark Industries. But she doesn't spy on Peter. He doesn't think.
Today Aunt May is picking him up, waiting outside of her car with two popsicles in hand. When she sees Peter coming, she smiles and holds one out. "Hey! Surprise-surprise!"
Peter takes it. It's supposed to look like SpongeBob, but his candy-eyes are halfway down his face and his buck teeth look more like fangs. It's scary. "Thanks, Aunt May."
Usually the only stuff allowed in Aunt May's car are drinks, and only drinks with tops on them, so something good happened or something bad happened or she's trying to make Peter happy. He thinks it's the third one, because she and Uncle Ben have been doing that a lot for the past few days.
Plus today is Dad's birthday, and Peter is still sad not because he can't go to Dad's grown-up party, but because he doesn't get to see him at all. Not today and not for a while.
"So how was it?" May asks once they're driving. She's not even licking her popsicle, just holding it up to her face. (Hers is supposed to look like Dora the Explorer and it is still very scary.) "Everything go alright?"
"Yep," Peter answers.
"Good. So no problems."
"No."
"Good," she says again.
Peter knows she wants him to say more, but he doesn't know how. It's not like school where he can say what they learned in class or what they played at recess; talking to Dr. Rittenburg is all he does at the appointments so the only way to talk about them is to tell her what he told to Dr. Rittenburg, and it's supposed to be confidential.
Sometimes Peter thinks it's unfair, because he does talk about Aunt May and Uncle Ben a lot. Like how he's not really upset that Aunt May and Uncle Ben don't live together anymore, but it's still weird; not bad, just weird. Or like how he knows that maybe Aunt May doesn't really like Dad all that much and she's not really mean to Dad but Peter still wished she liked him. It's easy to tell Dr. Rittenburg that stuff because Dr. Rittenburg won't feel bad if he does.
The drive back home isn't long, but halfway through Aunt May realizes that her popsicle is melting because she's not licking it, so by the time they park her hand and shirt is covered with melted Dora-the-Explorer ice cream. She slops off the rest of it into a garbage can and gives her stick to Peter.
Halfway up the stairs—they live on the third floor, but the elevator is really bumpy and slow so they never take it—Aunt May says, "I've got a surprise for you!"
"Is it a Lego set?"
"No."
"Is it pizza?"
"No. But I wish. Maybe we should order some…"
"Is it a dog?"
"Let's get inside and I'll tell you!"
Now Peter is so excited that he's almost jumping on his feet, because they got a dog! They finally got a dog after he's been asking for so long, and he knows 100% that they got a dog because whenever Aunt May says there's a surprise and he starts guessing, she only tells him to stop when he guesses it right.
Aunt May opens the door, but Peter rushes in first, waiting to see a Dalmatian or a German Shepherd or a Golden Retriever.
There is no dog.
"Aw, man..."
Aunt May shakes her head as she shuts the door with her heel. "I told you it wasn't a dog!"
"I know…" Peter doesn't get too sad. They just didn't get a dog today.
"It's not a thing surprise anyway." Aunt May sets her purse down by the end table that has way too many Home & Garden magazines stacked on top of it, then spread her arm way out and says, "Uncle Richard is flying over!"
"Oh."
Aunt May's face twists in a funny way. Her arms drop back down. "'Oh', he says."
"I'm happy," he says, feeling bad because he does love Uncle Richard, but he's still really confused because he just saw him? And usually that would mean that something bad is happening but Aunt May seems too happy. "But why?"
"He still had all those vacation days to use, so he said he was going to fly over and spend some time with us. It's been a while, hasn't it?"
"Yeah. What are we going to do?"
"Well, that's what we've got to figure out. What do you want to do?"
Aunt May is in the kitchen now, dumping powdery coffee into the paper cup in the coffeemaker. Peter sets his chin on the island—he's tall enough to do that now—and thinks.
"We can go to the Statue of Liberty."
"That'd be fun!"
"We can get pizza. Uncle Richard likes New York pizza."
"Aunt May likes New York pizza, too, and now that Nephew Peter mentioned it she has to order some tonight." Aunt May presses the button and the coffeemaker starts gurgling in that way Peter thinks it isn't supposed to but Aunt May says is fine. "What else?"
Peter thinks harder. He knows there's always the stuff that people do every time they come up to New York, but it'd be nice if they could do something that's special right now.
"Can we go to the Stark Expo? I still got the VIP passes!"
Aunt May doesn't nod right away. She holds a hand over the rumbling coffeemaker and then nods, like she forgot to. "Sure! We can do that."
Peter pretends he doesn't notice, but he does. He knows why Aunt May hesitated—a word that he sees in real life way more often lately—even though they've never really talked about it.
It's another thing that he talks to Dr. Rittenburg about: Uncle Richard doesn't like Dad, probably more than Aunt May doesn't like Dad, and Peter doesn't know what to do about it.
But Dr. Rittenburg said that it would probably help if instead of thinking about stuff that made him sad, he "reframed it" and thought about stuff that he wanted to keep talking about. So for right now, he just says, "I'm going to my room," and Aunt May says "M'kay" while the coffee keeps spitting out.
Sometimes Peter misses his room back in Malibu, especially the rocket ship bed and the spinning shelf. He misses when the stars in his ceiling looked like real stars and not the green star-shaped ones he had now. But he still likes his room a lot because Aunt May lets him decorate it however he wants. So now all the walls are covered in Iron Man drawings and he still has that Iron Man balloon tied to his bed.
On his desk he has Dad's birthday present. Peter isn't happy that he's missing Dad's birthday but he's happy that he gets more time to work on his birthday present, because Peter thought it was finished but it really wasn't. It's an Iron Man made out of popsicle sticks. It's three feet tall and Peter almost made it all by himself. Uncle Ben helped him build the base of it with Styrofoam and cardboard.
Peter did that thing where he got tired of doing something so he rushed through with it so a lot of his coloring got sloppy, and now instead of red and gold some of it is that light brown wood color and even green or blue or whatever color the ice cream on the sticks was. Now Peter is adding more sticks and doing them with paint instead of markers.
He takes the top off of the red paint and pretends that he's in a super lab like Dad's, one full of machines and computers. He pretends that when his brush goes on the popsicle stick that it's making sparks fly everywhere and that he's squinting through the big mask protecting his face.
Peter wants to be an astronaut so he can go to space, and he wants to be an archeologist so he can find dinosaur bones, and he wants to be a photographer so he can just take cool pictures. Now he thinks he wants to be a mechanic, because even though Dad never really let him do any of the "big stuff" in the lab, he always thought he'd be good at it. He'd still be able to make that teleporting machine. He'd be able to make all kinds of stuff, just like Dad.
Just like Dad.
Peter stops brushing and he stops pretending. He's not in his lab anymore, he's just at his desk in his room. The popsicle-stick Iron Man is good. He's proud of it. But it's not really Iron Man. It's not really made of titanium alloy and it can't really fire things and it can't really fly. It can't actually save anyone the way Dad does.
Another thing he talks to Dr. Rittenburg about: Aunt May and Uncle Ben and Uncle Richard are all freaked out by the stuff that Dad does because he's Iron Man and Peter doesn't know how to tell them that he wants to do that, too.
Peter thinks that if he tried, and if he had his own suit, then he could be as good as Iron Man. Or maybe he and Dad could even team up. Dad could be Iron Man and he could be…Metal Man. Nickel Man. Copper Man. If Dad can do everything he does when it's just him, then if Peter helped too then they could do way more. Like if there was a bank robbery and a sinking boat at the same time then Dad could go take care of one thing and Peter could do the other.
Then maybe Peter could help people instead of running or hiding or being carried away. Then maybe one day there'll be another kid just like him with pictures of Peter on the wall, with a Peter balloon tied to his bed. Not a Peter balloon, though, but a balloon of who Peter will be.
Gold Man. Platinum Man. Zinc Man? There has to be a cool name to go with Dad's.
Aunt May always knocks before she comes into his room now, but this time she says "knock-knock" so Peter will open the door for her. She has two coffee cups, one just white and the other patterned with Tweety Birds. The Tweety Bird cup is Aunt May's and no one else's.
"Here you go; it's hot. Be careful."
"Thanks." Peter takes a sip and tries not to wince. Before he was only allowed to drink coffee if it was one-third coffee and two-thirds milk and sugar but now Aunt May and Uncle Ben let him have half coffee and half milk and sugar, and he was very excited about that because coffee is very much an adult drink. But now that there's less sugar he…doesn't really like it that much…
Aunt May nods at Popsicle Stick Man. "That's looking really good!"
"I still gotta redo a lot of them."
"Still. How are you going to do the, uh…" Aunt May moves her free hand in a pew-pew way. "The light-shooters."
"They don't shoot light; they shoot neutrons in ionized air made by kilowatt lasers. And I think I'm going to use shiny stickers."
"Oh. Cool." Aunt May sits down on the bed (unmade because Aunt May doesn't care about that) and picks up the sheets of paper on his nightstand. Uncle Ben got him a drawing board because leaning over the desk so much hurt Peter's neck. Some nights he falls asleep drawing and just puts the papers on the nightstand when he wakes up. "So tell me what this is."
"A while ago Mrs. Middleton made us come up with our own animal for a project and we had to say stuff like…what it eats and where it lives and stuff. That's a jellyfish with this big tentacle shaped like a shovel so it can bury itself in the sand and make its stingers look like coral. Then the fish get trapped inside and it eats them."
"Well. That's horrifying."
"Sea animals are scary. They have teeth. Remember that time we saw the spider crabs and—"
"No, I absolutely do not remember that time. So let's not talk about it."
Peter giggles, but stops. He, Uncle Ben, and Aunt May had been at the New York Aquarium and made it to the spider crab exhibit—Peter thought they were cool because they looked like robots to him, but Aunt May kept squirming the whole time and asking to move on. Peter had noticed that there was a crawling area for kids to go under the tank and come up in a bubble inside and had gone in without telling anyone. So when Aunt May saw Peter suddenly pop up in the middle of the spider crabs, she'd screamed so loudly an employee rushed over to see what was wrong.
Peter and Uncle Ben loved that story probably just as much as Aunt May hated it.
Aunt May flips to another drawing. "And this?"
"Combo animals. Like two animals mashed up into one animal. That's a rabbit and a cat mixed into a cabbit. And that's a fox and a flamingo mixed into a foxingo."
"And this?" Aunt May points at the one in the corner, a monkey poking its head out of a green shell while it swings from a vine. "Looks like a monkey and a turtle. So a…monkle?"
"No. A turkey."
Aunt May makes that face she always makes when Peter or Uncle Ben makes a pun: kind of angry. Mission accomplished.
She isn't angry for long, though, and flips to the next paper smiling again, until she looks at it and stops. "Um…What's this?"
Peter turns around and feels his stomach twist up. He forgot to put that one away under his bed where the other ones are; he didn't want anyone else to see it before Dad did.
It's not really a drawing; kind of like the blueprints Dad has in his lab. It's supposed to be one of Iron Man's repulsors, but it kind of just looks like a glove with a circle in it. Tube under the wrist, and Peter has drawn arrows pointing it out—probably the arrows don't need to be there, but blueprints have arrows on them, so. Peter's idea for this invention is that, when you want to use it, you can light a flame like a lighter over the hole at the end of the tube and pump gasoline through the tube until fire shoots out, like a flamethrower without all the bulky stuff. On the paper, the fire is shown by crazy scribbles of red and yellow and orange, and the bad guys being hit are black figures covered in red.
"It's an idea I had for Iron Man. Like if his repulsors stopped working and he needed to use fire instead. Or water, in case there was a fire."
Aunt May nods but she doesn't look interested in it like she was in the other pictures. She's looking at the paper like she looked at the spider crabs in the aquarium. "Do you…come up with stuff like this a lot? Weapons for Iron Man?"
The truth is 'yes'. A whole bunch of them. Tasers that can shoot hundreds of feet. Pods that will create puddles of acid once they hit the ground. A bulb that flashes so bright that the bad guy looking at it goes blind forever.
Some of them are for Dad, and some of them he wants to save if he ever gets to be like Dad. Peter thinks that there are so many things that Iron Man could do, he wonders why he's come up with them first. Iron Man has to hurt the bad guys and fire hurts a lot. It seems really obvious.
But Peter knows that Aunt May wants him to say no. Or she wants him to tell the truth but she wants the truth to be "no". And he knows that if he doesn't say no then he's probably going to have to talk to her the way he talks to Dr. Rittenburg.
"Not really. Just that one."
Aunt May nods but even though she looks through the other papers she doesn't smile again. Maybe Peter shouldn't bring up fire for a while. There was a lot of it at the race and maybe Aunt May doesn't want to think about it. Peter doesn't want to think about it, either, and not because of the fire and the wreck and the lightning. That stuff was scary, but he hates remembering how he cried until snot was running down his nose and he could only make that hyuh-hyuh-hyuh sound. And he hates remembering that nothing would've happened if Peter wasn't a dumb kid and saw that the bad guy was a bad guy.
Another thing he talks to Dr. Rittenburg about: he still hasn't told anyone but Dad that he was with the bad guy (Vanko? Venko?) and he isn't going to. The only thing that will happen is everyone will be upset.
Wanting to change the subject because he's pretty sure Aunt May is about to keep going, Peter steps back from the desk and asks, "Do you think the colors are right?"
"Hm? Oh, sure." Aunt May stands back up from the bed and looks around at all the other papers and the balloon. "I think you know the suit better than Tony does."
Peter stands by her and tries to imagine Popsicle Stick Man back at the mansion. Probably not in Dad's lab because it could catch on fire, but maybe it could go in the living room or the office that Peter was technically allowed to go into but never did because it was the least-cool room in the mansion. It's not shiny and it's not really expensive, but Peter is proud of it, and sad that Dad doesn't have it yet and probably won't for a while now that they have to spend time apart again.
"What's wrong?" Aunt May ruffles his hair. He finally got it cut two days ago, and even though it was because Aunt May wanted him to, he can tell she's annoyed that his hair doesn't flop around when she touches it anymore. "It looks really good, Pete. Seriously."
"I know. I just wish I could give it to Dad already."
"Maybe you can send him a picture?"
"Mmm. I want it to be a surprise."
"I'm sure he won't mind waiting a while, hon."
Peter looks around his small room for ideas. Maybe he can't send Popsicle Stick Man over, but he could send something for at least a little bit of a birthday gift. He thinks about his drawings, but he's already sent a bunch of those. Can you send balloons in the mail? Probably they'd have to not be inflated yet, and that's not fun.
Then Peter spots the cardboard peeking out from behind his drawers, and he puts his coffee down on the desk and pulls it out.
"Maybe I can send him a picture of this? I haven't shown it to him yet."
"I think he'd like that!"
Aunt May watches him as he takes the picture. She has a look on her face but he doesn't know what it is, only that it's the same look on her face every time she looks at it.
Maybe it's because Howard Stark is a really big person in history that Aunt May knew about way before they even met Dad. Like maybe he was like George Washington and Peter just didn't know about him before because he was little. It would be weird if Peter found out George Washington was Aunt May's granddad, so it's not like he's mad at her or anything.
Even Peter thinks it's kind of weird, because he found out so much about his granddad without even meeting him. There are tons of books on him. He's in museums. When he asked Mrs. Matilda if he could do his granddad for the project—but said Howard Stark, not my granddad—he'd also asked if they were ever going to talk about him, and she said he would probably be in high school before he was taught about him.
He's a big deal, but…It's weird. Peter calls him my grandad in his head, but not Grandad. He's never met him and never will, and sometimes it's hard to even call him Dad's dad because Dad doesn't talk about him so it's like they aren't even related. Still, he's done a lot of cool things and without him there wouldn't even be a Stark Expo. Mostly, though, without Howard Stark then Peter wouldn't have Dad, which he pointed out a lot when he was presenting it. (This got him two points taken off of his one-hundred because Mrs. Matilda said he "kinda still did a poster on Iron Man when she told him not to".)
He remembers that Dad didn't really say that he liked Howard, but he also didn't say that he hated Howard, so Peter hopes that he'll at least like that he looked up all this stuff by himself. Dad spends a lot of time with Mom's family and Peter thinks it's fair if he learned more about Dad's family too.
Another thing he talks to Dr. Rittenburg about: his family is…kind of weird.
"Alright." Aunt May chugs the rest of her coffee, pats him on the head, and turns to go. "I'm going to go order those pizzas. Any requests?"
"Meat lover's."
"Aye, aye, captain."
After she leaves Peter shuts the door again and thinks about hiding his stash of drawings somewhere safer. Like maybe he should tape them underneath his bed. He doesn't want Aunt May finding them and finding out that he lied.
He kneels down to look under his bed, thinking that maybe he can do it, but while he's down there he sees something else and pulls it out to look at it.
He hasn't used the mask and repulsor Dad gave him for a while. After that kid at the Expo talked to him about it, Peter's gotten worried about someone wanting to really know where he got it from, or even someone stealing it. It's stayed here in his room.
Peter slides the mask on and wonders if this is what Dad really sees. He slides the repulsor on and wonders if this is how it feels on Dad's hand.
He's thought about asking Dad for stuff before, especially after the race, but never does because he's pretty sure Dad will say 'no' no matter what. But maybe if he just asked for a couple of upgrades to this, something he already has, then Dad would do it. Like a taser or a flashing bulb or something. He's already made so many other things to keep Peter safe.
Peter thinks that, and a lightbulb lights up over his head.
Dad has made a lot of things to keep Peter safe, and even though he probably won't make Peter anything that he can just use whatever he wants, maybe…maybe Dad gave him something just in case. Maybe Peter doesn't have to ask for anything because he already has it.
The idea is exciting, so much that he would tell Aunt May if he thought she wouldn't freak out about it, but it's kind of annoying, too. If it'll only work when something bad happens, then Peter's not going to know how to use it and it might not do any good.
So Peter raises up the repulsor to the lamp on the desk. Then the lightbulb in the ceiling, then the doorknob. Each time he imagines the bang, the rumbling in his arm, the flashing light. He practices for so long that the pizzas come and Aunt May calls him to eat. He hides the mask and the repulsor back under the bed and joins her on the couch. They watch House Hunters, and it's fun, and the pizza is good, and Peter guesses the house right, but all the while he wishes things were different so that he could tell Aunt May he thinks his aim is really good.
Hello friends! So, firstly, I want to apologize to everyone for not responding to all the comments. I will be more committed to it from here on out.
Secondly, I just want to give all my readers a heads-up. Soon I'll be heading to college for my final two years, and it will without of doubt be very intensive and demanding - not only because I have a thesis to write! Though I had hoped to keep this story going steadily, I realized that trying to do so would likely lead to two things happening: neglecting my studies to write this story, or focusing on my studies but getting crazy stressed-out about keeping this story going.
So although this probably isn't fun to hear, YAMS is going to be going on an extensive hiatus soon. The rest of the "Iron Man 2" part of YAMS will likely be finished in September, but after that I'm going to have to put this on the backburner for a while.
Which is probably for the best anyway, because let me be completely frank with you guys and say that I did the exact same thing with this fic that I've done with so many others: I committed to a very long story without a solid plan for it. I *do* have set plans for YAMS, but it's like I've just collected all the puzzle pieces without putting the actual puzzle together. Time off from the fic will let me make solid plans for its future. Also...burnout. I'm *already* busy with countless other things in my life, and as much as I like writing this fic, making yourself sit down and work on something when you're not up to it can *very easily* lead to no longer enjoying it.
I don't know exactly when the fic will be back. My studies may require that I put off actual writing of the story for extensive school breaks, like Christmas or even next summer, and be posted later. But if I get lucky then I may be able write in my free time, in which case Christmas/summer could be when the chapters are *posted*, not just *written*. Basically chapters are not going to be posted *regularly* for some time. I'll try to remember to put a post on my tumblr (iamconstantine) announcing the next chapters.
Like I said, I get if this is frustrating, but I've got to look out for my studies - and even my mental health, as I don't want to be overwhelmed with stress over not regularly updating this story. Hope that's understandable.
The actual *next* chapter, though, is very short and will thus be posted *very soon :)